John Birmingham - Without warning

It was evidence of a secret, inner life that Jules would never have imagined of Fifi Lamont, and she asked Miguel to add a few Hail Mary’s to the endless rosaries his extended family were sending skyward for old Adolfo, the only casualty their party suffered. Dead of a heart attack a full day after the gunfight.

‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus…’

Grandma Ana smiled and nodded sadly at Jules and then at the two bundles that had been her friends, and she realised that Miguel’s family, who had been praying in Spanish, had changed to English without her noticing. The Mexican matriarch waved a thin brown hand at Pete and Fifi’s bodies, indicating that the change was for their sake. Out of reflex, an earlier, more cynical Julianne Balwyn would have smirked and rolled her eyes at the idea of an omniscient God needing a translation, but now, on this bright and cold morning, Jules let the tears come freely as the age-old prayer to the mother of Jesus was whipped away on a freshening southerly breeze.

The sea state had dropped down to a long, rolling swell and only a few wisps of cirrus cloud spoiled an otherwise perfect sky. Time at last for a burial. Eight bodies lay wrapped in sheets and blankets on the large, bullet-pocked diving platform at the stern. Fifi and Pete, the last two bundles on the starboard side, she had placed there herself with a lot of help from Shah and Mr Lee. The gravity and sorrow of the moment was undercut somewhat by the frozen stiffness of Pete’s remains. He’d been lying in the largest of the galley freezers for over a month, and Jules wasn’t sure she’d have been able to contemplate moving him had Shah and Lee not helped.

‘Mr Pete, he would have loved this,’ said the old Chinaman, as they struggled with his body. ‘Would have laughed his giveilo anus right off, yes.’

And he would have, thought Jules, with a private smile and an involuntary hitching sob.

Fifi, though, she would’ve been really pissed off. Of all of them, Jules thought, her Oregonian friend had most easily dealt with everything that had happened. Perhaps because she’d been alone and fighting for herself most of her life. Mute and numb, staring at the inert swaddle of sheets in which the redneck princess was wrapped, Julianne could not help indulging in a small, bitter moment of self-loathing. If she had been smarter, if she had in any way been worthy of the trust everyone had placed in her, Fifi would still have been with them. Still grinning and shining and lighting up the face of everybody who encountered her.

‘… Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen… Hail Mary, full of grace…’

She was shaking – a slight tremor at first, something she didn’t really notice until it had spread through most of her body. She shivered inside her thick, dark oilskins, and her throat felt so tight she could not swallow. Beside her, the three surviving Gurkhas quietly sang a funeral song for their fallen comrades. Thapa and Birendra, which seemed to magnify the power of the Mexicans’ rosary chant. Her American passengers mumbled along, all of them having made it through except for Denby Moorhouse, who lay next to Birendra on the diving platform, shot down after saving her life during the battle. His mistress – ‘the boob job’, as Fifi had once called her – had found a black cocktail dress somewhere for her mourning outfit, creating an incongruous effect under a yellow rain slicker. The young woman dabbed at dramatically running mascara, but, regarding her from within the depths of her own misery, Jules thought she was going through the motions of grief, rather than its reality. The presence of Jason St John’s hand massaging her arse did detract somewhat from the air of decorous remembrance she was trying so hard to create. Moorhouse’s former squeeze had already moved cabins to take up with the trust-fund delinquent, much to the chagrin of his sister Phoebe, who was now refusing to talk to him.

Jules sighed at the petty, meaningless nature of it all.

One would’ve thought that people could have put aside all the silly wretchedness and just pulled together, but no. They couldn’t. Her father would have said it simply wasn’t in their nature. He was an old villain, there was no denying that, but in his own strange way he had a good heart, and he never stole from anyone who couldn’t afford it. There was even a spark of noblesse oblige in him, and he made sure that all of his children were raised to think of themselves as no better than anyone else. Because, as he so often told her, ‘In the end, Julianne, we’re all just as bad as each other.’

‘Miss Jules?’

Lee’s voice in her ear dragged her out of these reveries.

‘It is a warship, Miss Jules. On the radio. From New Zealand.’

She excused herself with a brief hand on Shah’s arm, and turned and left the funeral scene, secretly glad not to have to witness the dumping of the bodies into the deep.

‘He wishes to speak with our captain,’ said Lee, who had contented himself with just a few private words over the bodies of his comrades before everyone came together for the ceremony.

Our captain, thought Jules. How risible. ‘What does he want?’ she asked.

‘Oh, it is nothing bad. I have told him we have Uplifted Americans on board. He asks if we need assistance, and whether we will be berthing in Auckland or proceeding to Sydney.’

‘Okay, thanks, Mr Lee.’ She stopped before climbing the stairs up to the next deck. ‘What do you want to do, Lee, when we get there? They probably won’t let us keep this boat, you know. It’s not ours.’

Her one surviving friend shook his head sadly. ‘No. They will not, Miss Jules,’ he agreed.

‘And you can’t go home. Indonesia is a god-awful mess now.’

‘Yes, miss.’

‘So what will you do?’

He looked completely lost for the first time ever. ‘What will you do, Miss Jules?’ he asked in reply. ‘Maybe I come too.’

‘I don’t know either, Lee. These last few weeks, they’ve really taken it out of me. I don’t want to go home, I know that much. England looks nightmarish right now. A giant bloody jail, if you ask me, and not at all the sort of place for the likes of us.’

‘No, miss. Foreign Johnnies not welcome anymore.’

She started the long climb up towards the bridge, stopping just once to look back towards the stern and say her last goodbye. From here, against the vastness of the southern ocean, her little group of seafarers and survivors looked so vulnerable and sad. Like the last people on earth. But at least they were still alive.

Daddy would have been proud, she thought. He’d have been so proud of her, for bringing the ship and all of these people safely home, wherever that might turn out to be.

‘Don’t worry, Mr Lee,’ she said. ‘We’ll muddle through.’

The President of the United States was hunkered down over a small mountain of paperwork in the Oval Office of the newly christened Western White House. Of course, the office wasn’t oval-shaped at all, but he felt it important to retain a link with the past. Something to give people hope that they might be able to reclaim some of the advantages and even a fraction of the glory that the past had once gifted them as a nation.

He read the summation of the reports from the high-energy physics lab into the latest investigations of the Wave, but they all boiled down to the same thing: nobody knew shit.

He leaned back and rubbed at his eyes. His chief scientist and the National Security Advisor waited quietly on him, as they sat in the bright yellow armchairs arranged in front of his desk. He had no idea where the Governor of Washington had retrieved them from, just before he ‘gave up’ his accommodation for the needs of the federal government, but they were suitably hideous. A parting fuck-you of exquisite eloquence.